Exercise, therapy and diet can all improve life during cancer treatment and boost survival. Here’s how
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With so many high-profile people diagnosed with cancer we are confronted with the stark reality the disease can strike any of us at any time. There are also reports certain cancers are increasing among younger people in their 30s and 40s.
On the positive side, medical treatments for cancer are advancing very rapidly. Survival rates are improving greatly and some cancers are now being managed more as long-term chronic diseases rather than illnesses that will rapidly claim a patient’s life.
The mainstays of cancer treatment remain surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy and hormone therapy. But there are other treatments and strategies – “adjunct” or supportive cancer care – that can have a powerful impact on a patient’s quality of life, survival and experience during cancer treatment.
Keep moving if you can
Physical exercise is now recognised as a medicine. It can be tailored to the patient and their health issues to stimulate the body and build an internal environment where cancer is less likely to flourish. It does this in a number of ways.
Exercise provides a strong stimulus to our immune system, increasing the number of cancer-fighting immune cells in our blood circulation and infusing these into the tumour tissue to identify and kill cancer cells.
Our skeletal muscles (those attached to bone for movement) release signalling molecules called myokines. The larger the muscle mass, the more myokines are released – even when a person is at rest. However, during and immediately after bouts of exercise, a further surge of myokines is secreted into the bloodstream. Myokines attach to immune cells, stimulating them to be better “hunter-killers”. Myokines also signal directly to cancer cells slowing their growth and causing cell death.
Exercise can also greatly reduce the side effects of cancer treatment such as fatigue, muscle and bone loss, and fat gain. And it reduces the risk of developing other chronic diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Exercise can maintain or improve quality of life and mental health for patients with cancer.
Emerging research evidence indicates exercise might increase the effectiveness of mainstream treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Exercise is certainly essential for preparing the patient for any surgery to increase cardio-respiratory fitness, reduce systemic inflammation, and increase muscle mass, strength and physical function, and then rehabilitating them after surgery.
These mechanisms explain why cancer patients who are physically active have much better survival outcomes with the relative risk of death from cancer reduced by as much as 40–50%.
Mental health helps
The second “tool” which has a major role in cancer management is psycho-oncology. It involves the psychological, social, behavioural and emotional aspects of cancer for not only the patient but also their carers and family. The aim is to maintain or improve quality of life and mental health aspects such as emotional distress, anxiety, depression, sexual health, coping strategies, personal identity and relationships.
Supporting quality of life and happiness is important on their own, but these barometers can also impact a patient’s physical health, response to exercise medicine, resilience to disease and to treatments.
If a patient is highly distressed or anxious, their body can enter a flight or fight response. This creates an internal environment that is actually supportive of cancer progression through hormonal and inflammatory mechanisms. So it’s essential their mental health is supported.
Putting the good things in: diet
A third therapy in the supportive cancer care toolbox is diet. A healthy diet can support the body to fight cancer and help it tolerate and recover from medical or surgical treatments.
Inflammation provides a more fertile environment for cancer cells. If a patient is overweight with excessive fat tissue then a diet to reduce fat which is also anti-inflammatory can be very helpful. This generally means avoiding processed foods and eating predominantly fresh food, locally sourced and mostly plant based.
Muscle loss is a side effect of all cancer treatments. Resistance training exercise can help but people may need protein supplements or diet changes to make sure they get enough protein to build muscle. Older age and cancer treatments may reduce both the intake of protein and compromise absorption so supplementation may be indicated.
Depending on the cancer and treatment, some patients may require highly specialised diet therapy. Some cancers such as pancreatic, stomach, esophageal, and lung cancer can cause rapid and uncontrolled drops in body weight. This is called cachexia and needs careful management.
Other cancers and treatments such as hormone therapy can cause rapid weight gain. This also needs careful monitoring and guidance so that, when a patient is clear of cancer, they are not left with higher risks of other health problems such as cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that boost your risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes).
Working as a team
These are three of the most powerful tools in the supportive care toolbox for people with cancer. None of them are “cures” for cancer, alone or together. But they can work in tandem with medical treatments to greatly improve outcomes for patients.
If you or someone you care about has cancer, national and state cancer councils and cancer-specific organisations can provide support.
For exercise medicine support it is best to consult with an accredited exercise physiologist, for diet therapy an accredited practising dietitian and mental health support with a registered psychologist. Some of these services are supported through Medicare on referral from a general practitioner.
For free and confidential cancer support call the Cancer Council on 13 11 20.
Rob Newton, Professor of Exercise Medicine, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Okra vs Peas – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing okra to peas, we picked the peas.
Why?
Both are great, but…
In terms of macros, peas have nearly 2x the fiber, 2x the carbs, and 3x the protein, winning this round.
In the category of vitamins, okra has more of vitmains B5, B6, E, and K, while peas have more of vitamins A, B1, B3, B3, B7, B9, C, and choline, winning another round.
Looking at minerals, okra has more calcium, magnesium, manganese, and potassium, while peas have more copper, iron, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, for a marginal victory in the third round.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for peas, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
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How Sprinting Changes Your Body (Once Per Week Is Sufficient)
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Sprinting is often thought of as a pursuit of the young, but it can bring particularly important health benefits in later life:
And… Go!
Sprinting once per week can drastically improve health and fitness as we age. Specifically, it offers benefits some of which are unique to sprinting:
- Enhances range of motion and resilience.
- Burns 200 kcal in 2.5 minutes
- Boosts daily calorie burn by up to 950 kcal*
- Reduces cognitive decline and supports brain health.
- Builds bone density, especially in the tibia, but everywhere upwards from the tibia too.
*this is specific to sprinting, be it a running sprint or other kind of sprint (e.g. cycling, swimming, etc), and is a topic we’ve explored a lot in the category of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). In short, HIIT “confuses” the heart in a good way, which results in a sustained metabolic increase to meet the perceived needs (i.e. the body thinks “we might have to suddenly sprint again any minute, so let’s stay ready for that”), instead of the post-exercise metabolic compensatory slump that occurs after longer exercise sessions (e.g. endurance training). Note that if you sprint, once, that’s basically just a single interval of HIIT, and has the same benefits as such. Of course, if you do more intervals, you’ll get more benefits, but the point is that one interval is already doing your body good.
For more on all of this plus illustrative examples, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
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6 Signs Of Stroke (One Month In Advance)
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Most people can recognise the signs of a stroke when it’s just happened, but knowing the signs that appear a month beforehand would be very useful. That’s what this video’s about!
The Warning Signs
- Persistently elevated blood pressure: one more reason to have an at-home testing kit and use it regularly! Or a smartwatch or similar that’ll do it for you. The reason this is relevant is because high blood pressure can lead to damaging blood vessels, causing a stroke.
- Excessive fatigue: of course, this one can have many possible causes, but one of them is a “transient ischemic attack” (TIA), which is essentially a micro-stroke, and can be a precursor to a more severe stroke. So, we’re not doing the Google MD thing here of saying “if this, then that”, but we are saying: paying attention to the overall patterns can be very useful. Rather than fretting unduly about a symptom in isolation, see how it fits into the big picture.
- Vision problems: especially if sudden-onset with no obvious alternative cause can be a sign of neural damage, and may indicate a stroke on the way.
- Speech problems: if there’s not an obvious alternative explanation (e.g. you’ve just finished your third martini, or was this the fourth?), then speech problems (e.g. slurred speech, trouble forming sentences, etc) are a very worrying indicator and should be treated as a medical emergency.
- Neurological problems: a bit of a catch-all category, but memory issues, loss of balance, nausea without an obvious alternative cause, are all things that should get checked out immediately just in case.
- Numbness or weakness in the extremities: especially if on one side of the body only, is often caused by the TIA we mentioned earlier. If it’s both sides, then peripheral neuropathy may be the culprit, but having a neurologist take a look at it is a good idea either way.
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances
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Triphala Against Cognitive Decline, Obesity, & More
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Triphala is not just one thing, it is a combination of three plants being used together as one medicine:
- Alma (Emblica officinalis)
- Bibhitaki (Terminalia bellirica)
- Haritaki (Terminalia chebula)
…generally prepared in a 1:1:1 ratio.
This is a traditional preparation from ayurveda, and has enjoyed thousands of years of use in India. In and of itself, ayurveda is classified as a pseudoscience (literally: it doesn’t adhere to scientific method; instead, it merely makes suppositions that seem reasonable and acts on them), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have a lot to offer—because, simply put, a lot of ayurvedic medicines work (and a lot don’t).
So, ayurveda’s unintended job has often been finding things for modern science to test.
For more on ayurveda: Ayurveda’s Contributions To Science (Without Being Itself Rooted in Scientific Method)
So, under the scrutiny of modern science, how does triphala stand up?
Against cognitive decline
It has most recently come to attention because one of its ingredients, the T. chebula, has been highlighted as effective against mild cognitive impairment (MCI) by several mechanisms of action, via its…
❝171 chemical constituents and 11 active constituents targeting MCI, such as flavonoids, which can alleviate MCI, primarily through its antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective properties. T. Chebula shows potential as a natural medicine for the treatment and prevention of MCI.❞
Read in full: The potential of Terminalia chebula in alleviating mild cognitive impairment: a review
The review was quite groundbreaking, to the extent that it got a pop-science article written about it:
We’d like to talk about those 11 active constituents in particular, but we don’t have room for all of them, so we’ll mention that one of them is quercetin, which we’ve written about before:
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
For gut health
It’s also been found to improve gut health by increasing transit time, that is to say, how slowly things move through your gut. Counterintuitively, this reduces constipation (without being a laxative), by giving your gut more time to absorb everything it needs to, and more time for your gut bacteria to break down the things we can’t otherwise digest:
For weight management
Triphala can also aid with weight reduction, particularly in the belly area, by modulating our insulin responses to improve insulin sensitivity:
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Ant-ibiotics vs Antibiotic Resistance!
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Antibiotics are, in medical terms, very much a necessary evil.
- They are necessary: their invention and subsequent use has saved countless lives
- They are an “evil”:
- directly, they wipe out most of our microbiome, most of which we need to live, and certainly to live healthily. We wrote about this here: Antibiotics? Think Thrice ← including 4 ways antibiotics can kill you
- indirectly, they “train” a lot of pathogens to simply get more pathogenic, and in essence “what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger”, insofar as when something wipes out 99.9% of a microbe population, the other 0.1% often survived because it had a mutation that gave it the ability to resist the antibiotic. That mutation then gets copied forwards (because there are no other living microbes nearby whose genes to copy, so it’s the microbe with the mutation that get copied to start repopulating), and before you know it, we have a whole new “antibiotic-resistant” strain of the latest superbug.
Of course, the greatest part of this latter harm comes not from humans taking antibiotics directly, but from antibiotics being used in farm animals (including farmed fish) and entering the food chain that way. See for example: Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught: Important Differences
Still, taking antibiotics directly is also not something one should do unless it is very clearly indicated, and a competent doctor is telling you to do so.
Even then, there are some precautions that it’s good to take: Minimize The Harm Of Antibiotics
Ant-ibiotics to the rescue?
Researchers (Dr. Mary Chon et al.) noted that humans have used antibiotics for less than a century, while ants have developed and used antimicrobial compounds for tens of millions of years without widespread resistance.
So, how do they do it, and could we benefit from that?
What Dr. Chon and her team discovered is that ants produce multiple classes of antimicrobial compounds rather than relying on a single chemical defense, reducing the chance that pathogens evolve resistance. These compounds are produced naturally by the exocrine system—that’s like our endocrine system, but it’s exo-. In other words, for us it’s on the inside only, and for ants it’s on the outside. Much like our skeleton is on the inside, while ants have an exoskeleton.
❝If we just dump antibiotics into systems to kill everything, we’re not only killing our target pathogen but also killing all these other microbes that aren’t harming us. Just like us, ants seem to have different medicines in their medicine cabinet that they can try if the first one doesn’t work. And it looks like ants have been doing this for millions of years.❞
~ Dr. Clint Penick, a researcher on the team
In particular, the ants produce targeted compounds that act on specific groups of microbes, including fungi, gram-negative bacteria, and gram-positive bacteria, instead of broadly killing all microbes:
❝Inhibition also varied across microbial groups, with some species showing stronger effects against particular classes of microbes.
Notably, five of the six ant species tested inhibited Candida auris, an emerging fungal pathogen of critical concern in human medicine due to its multidrug resistance❞
~ Dr. Mary Chon et al.
The goal now, therefore, is identifying the specific compounds ants produce and understanding how they deploy them, with the aim of discovering new drugs for resistant infections.
You can find the paper itself, here: Dual strategies in ant antimicrobial defences: evidence for chemical diversity and microbial specificity
Want to learn more?
Check out:
Morin: Your Mouth’s New Best Friend
…for another nature-derived alternative to antibiotics.
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Peony Against Inflammation & More
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Yes, this is about the flower, especially white peony (Paeonia lactiflora), and especially the root thereof (Paeoniae radix alba). Yes, the root gets a different botanical name but we promise it is the same plant. You will also read about its active glycoside paeoniflorin, and less commonly, albiflorin (a neuroprotective glycoside present in the root).
It’s one of those herbs that has made its way out of Traditional Chinese Medicine and into labs around the world.
It can be ingested directly as food, or as a powder/capsule, or made into tea.
Anti-inflammatory
Peony suppresses inflammatory pathways, which thus reduces overall inflammation. In particular, this research review found:
❝Pharmacologically, paeoniflorin exhibits powerful anti-inflammatory and immune regulatory effects in some animal models of autoimmune diseases including Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE)❞
The reviewers also (albeit working from animal models) suggest it may be beneficial in cases of kidney disease and liver disease, along with other conditions.
Here’s a larger review, which also has studies involving humans (and in vivo studies), that found it to effectively help treat autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, amongst others:
❝Modern pharmacological research on TGP is based on the traditional usage of PRA, and its folk medicinal value in the treatment of autoimmune diseases has now been verified. In particular, TGP has been developed into a formulation used clinically for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
Based on further research on its preparation, quality control, and mechanisms of action, TGP is expected to eventually play a greater role in the treatment of autoimmune diseases. ❞
(TGP = Total Glucosides of Paeony)
Antidepressant / Anxiolytic
It also acts as a natural serotonin reuptake inhibitor (as per many pharmaceutical antidepressants), by reducing the expression of the serotonin transporter protein:
Gut Microbiota-Based Pharmacokinetics and the Antidepressant Mechanism of Paeoniflorin
(remember, most serotonin is produced in the gut)
Here’s how that played out when tested (on rats, though):
Against PMS and/or menopause symptoms
Peony is widely used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to reduce these symptoms in general. However, we couldn’t find a lot of good science for that, although it is very plausible (as the extract contains phytoestrogens and may upregulate estrogen receptors while dialling down testosterone production). Here’s the best we could find for that, and it’s a side-by-side along with licorice root:
❝Paeoniflorin, glycyrrhetic acid and glycyrrhizin decreased significantly the testosterone production but did not change that of delta 4-androstenedione and estradiol. Testosterone/delta 4-androstenedione production ratio was lowered significantly by paeoniflorin, glycyrrhetic acid and glycyrrhizin❞
Effect of paeoniflorin, glycyrrhizin and glycyrrhetic acid on ovarian androgen production
(note: that it didn’t affect estradiol levels is reasonable; it contains phytoestrogens after all, not estradiol—and in fact, if you are taking estradiol, you might want to skip this one, as its phytoestrogens could compete with your estradiol for receptors)
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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